The Last Theorem

9 LAZY DAYS

Everything considered, Ranjit was reasonably pleased with his summer. The job was easy, and no one seemed to mind if he brought his four goslings along to work. He was only to bother with babysitting them, Dot insisted, on the days when she absolutely had to be away from the house. There were a fair number of those days, though. Sometimes that was because she needed to look for work, although there she didn’t have much luck. More often she had to sell off a few more of their possessions to keep the children fed and clothed.

Ranjit noted that the absences did get more frequent. He thought that perhaps Dot was gaining confidence in him. He didn’t mind. Whether it was interest or mere politeness, the kids seemed enthralled by both his stories and his mathematical tricks. Ranjit’s years of puzzling over number theory had not been entirely for nothing. With his fellow students he had learned ways of playing with numbers that the average layman had never heard of.

There was, for instance, the one called Russian peasant multiplication. To begin with Ranjit determined that only Tiffany had got far enough in school to learn to multiply. To the others he said, “Don’t feel bad if you don’t know how to multiply numbers. In the old days there were plenty of grown-ups, particularly in places like Russia, who didn’t know how to do it, either. So they invented a trick. They called it ‘Russian multiplication,’ and it goes like this. First write down the two numbers side by side, like this. Say you want to multiply twenty-one by thirty-seven.”

He pulled from his pocket the little notebook he had had the fore-thought to take with him, wrote quickly, and displayed the page:

“Thendo you know how to double a number? Fine. Then double the number on the left, thats the twenty-one, and halve the number on the right, and write them under the first numbers. So then you get”

“There’s a one left after you halve that number on the right, but don’t worry about it. Just throw that leftover one away. Then you do the same halving and doubling thing with the next numbers, and the ones after that, until the number on the right side gets down to a one.”

“And whenever the number in the right-hand column is even, you just strike out that whole line.”

“And you add up the numbers in the left-hand column.”

Under it Ranjit wrote triumphantly “21 × 37 = 777” and said, “And that’s the answer!”

Ranjit waited for a response. Actually, he got four different ones. Little Betsy took her cue to clap her hands, applauding Ranjit’s success. Rosie looked pleased but puzzled, Harold was frowning, and Tiffany politely asked if she could borrow Ranjit’s pen and paper. He peered over her shoulder as she wrote:

“Yes,” she announced, “that’s right. Give me two other numbers, please, Ranjit.”

He gave her an easy one, eight times nine, and then another even easier one when Harold demanded a chance. He got it, and seemed as though he would gladly have gone on doing elementary Russian multiplication for some time longer, but the youngest girls were beginning to look rebellious. Ranjit deferred the thought of showing them why Russian multiplication was an example of binary arithmetic for another time. Well pleased at the success of his first infliction of number theory on the kids, he said, “That was fun. Now let’s catch some more turtles.”

Gamini Bandara got to Sri Lanka right on schedule, but when he called Ranjit, he was apologetic. His time was even more overprogrammed than he had realized. He wouldn’t be able to visit Tricomalee at this particular time, so would Ranjit very much mind coming up to Colombo for their visit instead?

Actually, Ranjit was a little put out, and didn’t very well conceal it. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know if I can get away from my job.” But Gamini was persuasive and, in the event, the foreman at the construction job was glad enough to let Ranjit take as many days as he liked (having a brother-in-law who would gladly take Ranjit’s place, and paycheck, while he was away). And Ganesh Subramanian positively went all out to help him. Ranjit had been afraid his father would be upset at the prospect of Gamini coming back into the picture. He wasn’t. Apparently a short visit, especially one that took place a considerable distance away, was not a problem. Ganesh made it as easy as possible for his son. “Bus?” he said with a dismissive gesture. “Certainly you won’t take the bus. I’ve got a van that’s assigned to me and I don’t use it. Take it, Ranjit. Keep it as long as you like. Who knows, the temple insignia on its doors may discourage some ill-intentioned people from letting the air out of your tires.”

So Ranjit arrived in Colombo with a bag in the back of the van packed with several days’ worth of clothes. Puzzlingly, Gamini had let him know that he would be staying at a hotel instead of his father’s house. Ranjit understood the choice of that particular hotel—it had a bar the two boys had visited frequently enough in their explorations of the city—but it surprised him that Gamini’s father had let him get away for even one night.

When Ranjit asked to be announced, the desk clerk shook his head, pointing to the bar. And indeed there in the bar was Gamini, and not alone. He had a girl on either side of him, and a nearly empty wine bottle on his table.

All three got up to greet Ranjit. The blond girl was named Pru; the other, whose name was Maggie, had hair of a lipstick color that had never been produced by human genes. “Met them on the plane,” Gamini said when he had finished the introductions. “They’re Americans. They’re students in London, they say, but the school they go to is the University of the Arts—that’s the one where the only thing you learn is how to look good. Ouch!”

That last part was because Maggie, the improbably redheaded one, had pinched his ear. “Pay no attention to this slanderer,” she instructed Ranjit. “Pru and I are at Camberwell. That’s the college at Arts where the instructors make you work. Gamini wouldn’t last a week there.”

Making an assumption, Ranjit stuck out his hand. The two girls pumped it earnestly, one after the other. “I’m Ranjit Subramanian,” he said.

The one named Maggie spoke up. “Oh, we know who you are,” she informed him. “Gamini told us everything there is to know about you. You’re a short person with a long name, and you spend all your time solving one single math problem. Gamini says if anybody ever does, you’ll be the one who does it.”

Ranjit, who still suffered occasional attacks of guilt for having neglected the Fermat problem, wasn’t sure how to respond to that. He looked to Gamini for help, but actually the expression on Gamini’s face was itself a little like guilt. “Listen, Ranj,” he began, his tone even more remorseful than his face, “I’d better tell you the bad news right away. When I wrote you, I was hoping you and I would have at least a couple of days together.” He shook his head. “Won’t happen. My dad’s got both of us booked up solid for every day, starting tomorrow. Family, you know.”

Ranjit did know, remembering those days before Gamini left for London. He let his disappointment show on his face. “I’ve got a week, car and all.”

Gamini gave him a rebellious shrug. “Can’t be helped. He even wanted me for dinner tonight, but I told him positively no.” He studied Ranjit for a moment, then grinned. “But, damn, I’m happy to see you! Give us a hug!”

That Ranjit was willing to do, first so as not to embarrass Gamini in front of the girls, then, as Gamini’s lean, hot body pressed against his own, with a return of real affection. “Anyway,” Gamini said, “you haven’t even had a drink yet. Pru, take care of that for me, will you?”

Aware that both girls had been studying something or other artistic, Ranjit tried conversation. “So you want to be an artist?” he asked Maggie.

She gave him an incredulous look. “What, and starve to death? No way! I’m pretty sure that what I’ll be doing is teaching art in some community college near Trenton, New Jersey, where my folks live. Or wherever my husband’s job is, when I have a husband.”

The blonde, Pru, spoke up. “Oh, I’d love to be an artist, Ranjit. I won’t make it, though. I have no artistic talent at all, and I don’t want to go back to the family in Shaker Heights. What I’m hoping for is a job as auctioneer at someplace like Sotheby’s. Good money, interesting people to work with, and I’d be around art even if I wasn’t creating any.”

Maggie handed Ranjit his arrack and Coke, laughing. “Fat chance,” she said.

Pru reached around Gamini’s legs with one of her own and kicked her. “Pig,” she said. “I don’t mean right away. You start out as an intern, and maybe the first thing they give you to do is get the numbers from the bid paddles that people at the back of the room are holding up—you know, where the actual auctioneer won’t be looking. Ranjit? Don’t you like arrack and Coke?”

Ranjit didn’t have a good answer to that. Actually, he had liked it pretty well when he and Gamini had been exploring Colombo but hadn’t had any of that particular drink since Gamini had left. But when he tasted it, it went down pretty agreeably. So did the next one.

Although the evening wasn’t what Ranjit had expected, it wasn’t turning out badly at all. At some point the girl named Pru had detached herself from Gamini and settled in next to Ranjit himself. He immediately noticed three things about her. She was warm, she was soft, and she smelled quite nice. Oh, not as nice as Myra de Soyza, or perhaps even as nice—in a quite different way, of course—as Mevrouw Beatrix Vorhulst, but still quite pleasing.

Ranjit not being a fool, he was quite aware that the way women smelled was primarily an artifact purchasable at any pharmacy. No matter. It was still quite pleasing, and Pru had other virtues as well, which included feeling good against his arm and, quite often, saying amusing things. Taken all in all, Ranjit decided that he was having quite a good time.

But as the evening wore on, he was aware that he had some unanswered questions in his mind. When the two girls went off to the powder room, he had a chance to approach some of the questions. As a beginning he asked Gamini if he had seen much of them in London. Gamini looked surprised. “Never set eyes on either one of them until they turned up on the plane from Dubai and we got to talking.”

“Oh, I see,” Ranjit said, although he wasn’t sure he did. For clarification he asked, “What about your friend Madge?”

Gamini gave him a long and amused look. “You know what your problem is, Ranjit? You worry too much. Madge is in Barcelona, I guess with whoever it is that sends her texts every other hour. Have another drink.”

Ranjit did. In fact they both did, and so did the two girls when they returned. It wasn’t quite the same as before, however. Ranjit’s drink sat unfinished before him, and so did most of the others. And then Maggie whispered something in Gamini’s ear. “Oh, all right,” Gamini said to her; and then to Ranjit he said, “I’m afraid it’s about that time. It’s been good seeing you again, but my father and I have to take off for Grandma’s first thing in the morning. So we’re going to pack it in.” He stood up, smiling. “Give us a hug, will you?”

Ranjit obliged, and got one from Maggie as well. “By the way,” Gamini added as they turned to go, “don’t worry about the check. It all goes on my father’s tab. Come on, sweets.” And as he and Maggie threaded their way between tables to the door, Ranjit understood what the plural pronoun had implied.

And there Ranjit was, just him and the girl named Pru.

He lacked experience to tell him what was expected of him under these circumstances. He had, however, seen enough American films to get a clue. “Would you like another drink?” he said politely.

She shook her head, grinning. She nodded at the nearly full glass in front of her. “I’ve barely wounded the last one. Anyway, I think another drink would be pretty superfluous, don’t you?”

He did, but he was running out of ideas for the next step. In the films, at this point the man might ask the woman if she would care to dance. That wasn’t an option here; no dancing was going on in this hotel bar, and anyway Ranjit didn’t know how.

Pru saved him. “It’s been a very nice evening, Ranjit Subramanian,” she told him, “but I want to get up and do some sightseeing tomorrow. Do you think the waiter can get me a taxi?”

Ranjit was surprised. “You aren’t in this hotel?”

“Booked the accommodation before we left London, and we took what they gave us. It’s only about a five-minute ride away.”

At that point Ranjit knew what to do, and did. Pru was glad to be given a ride in the temple’s van—even if Ranjit was a little drunk behind the wheel—and she was interested to hear about Ranjit’s father’s position in the temple, along with a sketchy outline of the long and colorful history of Tiru Koneswaram. Enough so that she invited him in to sober up with a cup of coffee when they got to her hotel.

The travel agency in London had given the girls a young people’s hotel, with a lot of young people making the lobby a bit too noisy for a conversation, so Pru invited Ranjit up to her room. They talked, sitting companionably close, and propinquity worked its magic. Within an hour Ranjit had lost his virginity, or at least his cross-gender virginity. He enjoyed it very much. So did Pru, enough so that they did it twice more before they finally got to sleep.

The sun was high and hot when the sound of a key in the lock woke them. It was Maggie, and she did not seem surprised to find both Ranjit and Pru in one of the room’s twin beds. Gamini? Oh, he was long gone, had jumped out of the bed and into his clothes when reception called to say that his father was waiting for him in the lobby. “And anyway,” Maggie said, giving Pru an inquiring look, “we’re supposed to be taken to lunch by your life-drawing instructor’s cousin at the embassy, and it’s a quarter after ten.”

Ranjit, who was getting into his clothes as fast as he could, took that for an exit cue. What he wasn’t sure of was how to take leave of Pru, and this time she was not helpful. She did give him a hearty good-bye kiss. But when he tentatively suggested that if they wanted sightseeing he was available, she couldn’t see a way of fitting him into their other obligations that day, or any other day, for that matter.

Ranjit got the message. He kissed her again, with the intensity dimmed down much lower this time, waved a farewell to Maggie, and left.

Back in the van, he considered. He had the van and his own freedom for at least a week. But there was nothing to keep him in Colombo, and nothing to attract him to any other part of Sri Lanka. So he shrugged and started the engine and began the long drive back to Trinco.

An hour later he was outside of the Colombo city limits, and wondering what his father would say when he returned the van so early. Most of his wondering, though, was devoted to the subject of Ms. Pru Never-Did-Know-Her-Last-Name. Why had she behaved in the way—no, in the several contradictorily different ways—that she had in their short but, at least for Ranjit, highly significant relationship? He was nearly thirty kilometers down the road before he came to a satisfactory answer.

Well, “satisfactory” wasn’t the best word to use. He was fairly sure he had the explanation, but he didn’t like it at all. His conclusion was that Pru’s actions were a function of his skin color. Having sex with a short and dark-skinned Asian man—what was the name people in Pru’s social class used for that sort of person? Oh, yes. “Wog.” For wily Oriental gentleman. Having sex with such a man might be an enjoyable experiment when no one knew about it except another young woman engaged in doing the same thing. But it was not acceptable where one might be seen by people who might speak of it to people in London, or to people in Shaker Heights, whatever Shaker Heights might happen to be.

So for the next hour or so Ranjit’s thoughts were glum. They didn’t stay that way, though. Whatever thoughts might have been in Pru’s mind, the things her body had been doing while she was thinking them were quite pleasing for him to remember. It had been, Ranjit admitted to himself, one of the most intensely pleasurable experiences of his life. All right, it appeared that it was to be a one-time-only event with that particular partner, but there were other women in the world, were there not? Including some who were not concerned about the color of his skin?

Including, for instance, Myra de Soyza?

That was an interesting new thought for Ranjit. Experimentally he set his imagination a new task, which was to replay his memories of the night in bed with Pru Something, but replace Pru in the role of Female Partner with Myra herself.

Ranjit had not previously been thinking of Myra in that way, exactly, but he discovered that it wasn’t hard to do. It was pretty enjoyable, too, until, unfortunately, the thought of the Canadian hotel man, Brian Harrigan, began to come up in his mind. That part wasn’t pleasant at all.

Reluctantly Ranjit gave up that experiment and, doing his best not to think of anything at all, simply drove on.

The sun was nearly setting by the time he at last got to Trincomalee. Ranjit thought about going back to his lonely room, but what he wanted was someone to talk to about—well, not about Pru Last-Nameless, of course, but anyway just to talk. He took a chance on driving to the Kanakaratnam house, and won.

They were all inside. Though the door was closed, he could hear Dot Kanakaratnam’s voice, but no one else’s. When Tiffany answered his knock and let him in, he saw that her mother was sitting at the table and talking into a cell phone. (Ranjit hadn’t known she owned one.) When she saw him in the doorway, she said a few quick words into the phone and folded it shut. There was something in the look on her face that troubled Ranjit—anger? Sadness? He couldn’t tell. What she said was “You’re early, Ranjit. We thought you’d be spending more time with your friend.”

“So did I,” he said, a tad ruefully, “but it didn’t work out. I had a good time, though.” He had not been intending to tell them exactly how good, more about what an interesting place Colombo was, but the expressions on the faces of the children stopped him. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

Dot answered for the whole family. “It’s George. My husband. He’s escaped.”

That was news that trumped anything Ranjit might have said. He pressed for details. George Kanakaratnam, for some inscrutable police reason, had been in the process of being transferred from one prison to another. There had been a car crash. The guard and the driver had been killed. Kanakaratnam had not, and he had simply walked away.

“The Trinco police were here all day,” Harold volunteered when his mother paused to breathe. “They said Da might have got away on a boat. There was a bridge that went over a pretty big river right down the road.”

“But there wasn’t any blood there,” Rosie said triumphantly, puzzling Ranjit. It seemed to him that with two dead, there had to be some spilled blood somewhere around the scene.

Tiffany clarified the matter. “She means there wasn’t any blood inside the bus, except for right around the front seats. So our father probably didn’t get hurt.”

Dot met Ranjit’s look with a hostile look of her own. “You’re thinking of George as a jailbird, but to them he’s their father. Naturally they love him,” she informed Ranjit. Then, in a friendly tone, “Can I give you a cup of tea? And we’d like to hear all about your trip.”

Obeying her gesture, Ranjit sat at the table. He didn’t get a chance to tell them his story, though, because Tiffany was waving her hand. When the girl spoke, it wasn’t to Ranjit but to her mother. “Is this when we should tell him about the letter?” she asked.

Dot gave Ranjit a stricken look. “Oh, I’m sorry. There was so much going on here that I just forgot.” She scrabbled in the litter of papers on the table for a moment, then pulled out an envelope and handed it to Ranjit. “One of the monks brought it. It’s been sitting in the temple mail room for a week because nobody told them where you were staying.”

“And then this morning, when they figured it out, they tried to deliver it to your room, but you weren’t there,” Tiffany put in. “And our mother told them they could leave it here and we’d see that you got it.”

Dot looked embarrassed. “I did, yes. The police were here, and I just wanted everybody to go away….”

She stopped when she realized Ranjit was no longer listening to her. The envelope had the return address of the beach hotel nearest the construction site. So did the sheet of notepaper inside, and what it said was:

It was signed Myra de Soyza.

Ranjit didn’t wait for the tea with the Kanakaratnams. “I’ll see you later,” he said, already on his way out the door.

Driving to the hotel didn’t take longer than twenty minutes. The young woman at the desk was as helpful as she could be, but when it came down to it, all she could tell him was, “Oh, but they checked out yesterday, Ms. de Soyza and Mr. Harrigan. I think they may have gone back to Colombo.”

Back in the van Ranjit allowed himself to admit how much he regretted having missed her—and how much he disliked the fact that she and the Canadian were traveling together. His mood depressed, he drove slowly back. At the turn that would have taken him to the Kanakaratnam house he paused, then turned the other way. It was interesting, in a way, that Dot’s husband had managed to escape from a federal prison. Ranjit had looked forward to telling the children about his trip, too. Well, about parts of it.

But not right now. Right now he didn’t want to talk to anybody about anything.

The next day he went back to his job. The foreman’s brother-in-law was not at all happy to see him, but when Ranjit picked up the Kanakaratnam children, they were happy enough that it made up for it. When it became story time, they loved hearing about how the kings of Kandy had fought off the European invaders for so many years (as Ranjit had read off his computer first thing that morning) and did not seem to want to talk about their escapee father.

Neither did their mother, not for several days, at least, and then when he stopped off for the kids one morning, he didn’t get them.

Dot Kanakaratnam was seated at the table, putting clothes and household goods into sacks, and all four of the children were packing little bundles of their own. When she saw the question in Ranjit’s eyes, she gave him a great smile. “I have wonderful news, Ranjit! Some old friends have found me a job! It’s right here in Trinco, too, although down by the port. I’m not sure what the work is, exactly, but they say it will pay well and an apartment of our own comes with it!”

She gave Ranjit an expectant look. “That’s—wonderful,” he said, doing his best to supply what she wanted. He found himself wondering how she couldn’t know what job she was taking, but he realized she was desperate, so he didn’t pursue it. “When would you start?”

“Almost immediately. There is one thing, though, Ranjit. You still have your father’s van, don’t you? And taxis are so expensive. Could you give us a lift to the port?”